The present disclosure relates generally to communication networks, and more particularly, to forwarding traffic in a virtual machine environment.
Data centers often use a small percentage of available CPU, storage, and memory capacity. This results in deployment of more servers than are necessary to perform a specified amount of work. Additional servers increase costs and create a more complex and disparate environment that can be difficult to manage. Many data center managers are turning to virtualization so that resources can be shared across a network.
Virtualization is a technology which allows one computer to do the job of multiple computers by sharing resources of a single computer across multiple systems. Through the use of virtualization, multiple operating systems and applications can run on the same computer at the same time, thereby increasing utilization and flexibility of hardware. Virtualization allows servers to be decoupled from underlying hardware, thus resulting in multiple virtual machines sharing the same physical server hardware.
Since multiple virtual machines may reside on the same server, traffic forwarding is performed between virtual machines on the same server and virtual machines on different servers.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.